"Virgilian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fact had already succeeded in affecting Christian theology to an extent which the scorners of Paganism little suspect. Most of these Hellenists pushed their admiration of Greek literature to an excess. They were opposed by the Virgilian predilections of Pulci's friend, Politian, who had nevertheless universality enough to sympathise with the delight the other took in their native Tuscan, and its liveliest and most idiomatic effusions. From all these circumstances in combination arose, first, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... grain Opened a door. An unexpected light Flashed on him cheerful from a fire and lamp, That burned alone, as in a fairy-tale: Behold! a little room, a curtained bed, An easy chair, bookshelves, and writing-desk; An old print of a deep Virgilian wood, And one of choosing Hercules! The youth Gazed and spoke not. The old paternal love Had sought and found an incarnation new! For, honouring in his son the simple needs Which his own bounty had ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... to softer and more Virgilian influences. The purple patches are longer and more frequent. On page 99 we learn not only how to get to Baiae, ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... she was bound to perish: the gods had decreed it.... There was in all that a concentrated emotion, a depth of sentiment, a religious appeal which stirred Augustin's heart, still unaware of itself. This obedience of the Virgilian hero to the heavenly will, was already an adumbration of the humility of the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... something coming to Mr Blackwood for the thousands that profit by his labours in America—but if it can't be so, let the glory suffice him, and let Sic vos non vobis be his song of patient resignation. The parallel between his case and that of the Virgilian sufferers, is perfect. Who concentrates more pungency, or collects more sweets than the busy bee? Who keeps more musical throats in time than the motherly bird? Who lends the agricultural interest greater assistance than the labouring ox; or who suffers more by the manufacturers ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... use of Theocritus, while in the Georgics he has chosen Hesiod as his model. The later didactic poets of all ages have imitated Virgil, particularly in England, where Thomson's Seasons is a thoroughly Virgilian poem. It is easy to see in Virgil where borrowed methods end and native strength begins; for, in spite of being close imitators of the Greek, there is a character peculiar to the writers of Rome by ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... eye, From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs Seem'd surging the Virgilian cry,[B] The sense of ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... spiritual ruin in this life, and not a literal hell—the dog Cerberus as its gatekeeper—with this special marking of his character of sensual passion, that he fawns on all those who descend, but rages against all who would return (the Virgilian "facilis descendus" being a later recognition of this mythic character of Hades); the last labor of Hercules is the dragging him up to the light; and in some sort he represents the voracity or devouring of Hades itself; and the ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... a man of letters, two essential qualifications for any one who would render in English verse the picturesque pastorals of Italian provincial life, or the stately and polished epic of Imperial Rome. Dryden was a true poet, but, for some reason or other, he failed to catch the real Virgilian spirit. His own qualities became defects when he accepted the task of a translator. He is too robust, too manly, too strong. He misses Virgil's strange and subtle sweetness and has but little of his exquisite melody. Professor Conington, on the other hand, was an admirable and painstaking ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the shade by a cool fountain, just as he would do in Southern Italy to-day, for his rest after the midday meal. Suddenly a snake, the horrors of which are described with a vividness that is truly Virgilian, appears upon the scene and prepares to strike the shepherd. A passing gnat, the hero of the poem, sees the danger, and wakes the shepherd by stinging him in the eye. He springs up angrily, brushes it off with his hand, and dashes it lifeless ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... in hexameters, in the second of the volumes now before us, that the question of the total inadmissibility of that measure in English verse can be considered as finally settled; the true point not being whether such lines are as good as, or even like, the Homeric or Virgilian models, but whether they are not in themselves a pleasing variety, and on that account alone, if for nothing else, not to be ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... her books. At Hampstead, too, I foregathered with Sydney Dobell, a strangely beautiful soul, with (what seemed to me then) very effeminate manners. Dobell's mouth was ever full of very pretty Latinity, for the most part Virgilian. He was fond of quoting, as an example of perfect expression, sound conveying absolute sense of the ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... its simplest terms, Rapin's theory is Virgilian. When deducing his theory from the works of Theocritus and Virgil, his preference is almost without exception for Virgil. Finding Virgil's eclogues refined and elegant, Rapin, with a suggestion from Donatus (p. 10 and p. 14), concludes that the pastoral "belongs properly to the Golden ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... poetry and painting are divided from one another in aim, in effects, in reach, by the limits set upon each by the nature of its own material.[62] So Diderot says that the painter could not seize the Virgilian moment, because a body that is partially immersed in water is disfigured by an effect of refraction, which a faithful painter would be bound to reproduce; because the image of the body could not be seen transparently through the stormy waters, and therefore the god ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... chosen delicacy of expressions of the latter, are as a mist of light which conceal from us the intense and exceeding truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry. Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The institutions also, and the religion of Rome were less poetical than those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the substance. Hence poetry in Rome, seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the perfection of political and ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... "Where'er the god hath moved around his graceful head." The hideous figure of that ebriety, in its most disgusting stage, the ancients exposed in the bestial Silenus and his crew; and with these, rather than with the Ovidian and Virgilian deity, our own convivial customs ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the God of all the earth has curious reminiscences of the parts played by the deities in pagan poetry. Over the style the influence of Virgil is supreme. Criticism indeed offers few more alluring tasks than the attempt to gauge the comparative effects of the Virgilian cadences upon the styles of the men of after times who loved them most—Tacitus and St. Augustine, Dante, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... little disposed to unsettle the reader's faith in the Virgilian tradition, as to part with my own; and I therefore uncandidly hold back the names of the authorities cited. This tradition was in fact the only thing concerning Mantuan history present to my thoughts as I rode ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... This interlocutor in short, while Mrs. Brook's representative privately thought over all he had in hand, went at some length and very charmingly—since it was but a tribute to common courtesy—into the Virgilian associations of the Bay of Naples. Finally, however, he started, his eye having turned to the clock. "I'm afraid that, though our hostess doesn't appear, I mustn't forget myself. I too came back but yesterday and I've an engagement—for ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... last of whom plays a far more important part than in the Aeneid. Where possible, he substitutes human for divine intervention, and ignores the idea of the glorification of Rome and Augustus, which dominates the Virgilian epic. On this work were founded the Eneide or Eneit (between 1180 and 1190) of Heinrich von Veldeke, written in Flemish and now only extant in a version in the Thuringian dialect, and the Eneydos, written by William Caxton in 1490. See Eneas, ed. J. Salverdo ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and he deserves to be tried by a high standard, Gibbon fails not much, but entirely. The Observations are rarely, if ever, quoted as an authority of weight by any one engaged on classical or Virgilian literature. This arises from the attitude of the writer, who is nearly solely occupied with establishing negative conclusions that AEneas was not a lawgiver, that the Sixth AEneid is not an allegory, that Virgil had not been initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries when he wrote it, and ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison |
